Deborah Bloomfield

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In 1987, a terrible accident unfolded in Goiânia, Brazil, where a radioactive capsule had been abandoned. People later found what they believed to be scrap metal and sold it on, beginning a sequence of events that would lead to the screening of over 112,000 residents for radioactive contamination, and the deaths of four people. The […]

Gender stereotypes can be conveyed in ways that go beyond visual and linguistic expressions, new research has shown. It seems that sound and music play a role too, as the music and soundscapes used in toy commercials can influence how children perceive masculinity and femininity. The advertising industry is extremely powerful when it comes to […]

Vampire bats might have developed a creepy reputation with all the eating blood and flapping about at night, but their ability to survive off an entirely blood-based diet is part of what makes them so remarkable. Now, new research has taken a look at just how this diet can power vampire bats, and set them […]

Who said watching movies all day can’t be educational? Scientists have just unveiled the most detailed functional map of the brain we’ve seen yet, and they got there using scans of people’s brain activity taken while they watched clips from Hollywood blockbusters and independent films. “Our work is the first attempt to get a layout […]

Have you ever noticed that new car tires are covered in rubbery, stubbly hairs? Don’t believe the rumors: they’re not for noise reduction or indicating tire wear, they are simply a by-product of the manufacturing process.  The small rubber prongs are technically known as vent spews, although they’re also called sprue nubs, tire nibs, gate […]

We tend to think of prehistoric life as hard. Brutal, even. Devoid of pleasure, outside of the odd mammoth steak or math class. But that dour picture tends to be missing something big – or rather, something small: kids. And, a recent study seems to suggest, they were having quite a bit of fun. The […]

A new satellite imagery technique allows scientists to see plastic on beaches from space. The technique can identify differences in how sand, water, and plastic reflect light, enabling researchers to spot debris on shorelines from over 600 km (372 miles) overhead. Plastic is a massive issue in many environmental contexts, but it is an increasingly […]

NASA’s planetary defense telescope Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) has burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere, ending 10 years of searching for and monitoring potential threats to Earth. NEOWISE began its mission as plain old WISE in December 2009, when it was launched to scan the entire sky in infrared. It completed this […]

The chemical properties of two of the heaviest synthetic elements, moscovium and nihonium, have been established for the first time. Moscovium is now the heaviest element whose chemical properties we know something about. Both elements have been shown to be modestly reactive, but making any useful compounds still runs up against their incredibly short half-lives. […]

In 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster led to the largest release of radioactive material into the environment in human history. It was a disaster for all forms of life, but how that accident is affecting wildlife in Ukraine today wasn’t entirely clear. Now, new research has shown that for the Eastern tree frog (Hyla orientalis), […]

Contrary to what some may assume, ancient peoples were just as capable as modern people of using unconventional methods in warfare. Rather than always being driven by ideas about honorable combat, people of the past exploited various ways to achieve their goals, including resorting to biological warfare. The proof of such a tactic has recently […]

An old mystery involving the tape recording of an unknown song has finally been solved by internet sleuths, nearly four decades after it began. The mystery began for one family in the 1980s, when a family member recorded a song off the radio onto a cassette tape. The family clearly liked the song, but were […]

A serendipitous discovery may lead to a new way of fighting cancer – even tumors that are resistant to immunotherapy – by suppressing a mechanism that cancer cells use to evade the body’s immune system. “It all happened by coincidence,” explained study lead Professor Carmit Levy of Tel Aviv University, in a statement. “My lab […]

For the first time ever, two black-footed ferret kits have been born to a cloned endangered animal. The mother is a ferret named Antonia who made the news when she was cloned from an old tissue sample, becoming one of three black-footed clones alive today. Antonia and her sister clones, Elizabeth-Ann and Noreen, were created […]

When eating steak, you get a lot of options available to you. As well as choosing the sauce, you can select how well cooked you’d like it, from the (intolerable) “blue” end of the spectrum to the equally unappetizing “well done”.  People on the Internet have noticed (surprisingly often) that you don’t get these sorts […]

Deaf male mosquitos don’t mate – that’s the finding of new research that tinkered with the little flies’ genes to understand the importance of hearing in their sex lives. The study focused on Aedes aegypti – these mosquitoes spread viruses infecting approximately 400 million people annually, including dengue, yellow fever, and Zika – and has […]

After decades of failed attempts, scientists have finally succeeded in coaxing animal cells into photosynthesizing. So far, the researchers have only managed to achieve the feat in cultured cells – which means that while sunlight-eating mammals are still some way off, we may eventually be able to use this technology for medical purposes or the […]

Colossal changes to ocean circulation have caused the waters of the North Atlantic to become significantly saltier in the past 50 years when compared to the world’s other great ocean, the Pacific.  The Atlantic Ocean is saltier than the Pacific Ocean. Evaporation is more intense in the Atlantic compared to the Pacific, especially in the […]

When Earth and the hazardous asteroid 99942 Apophis pass by each other in five years’ time, the passage through Earth’s gravitational well could reshape the space rock’s surface. A new paper seeks to predict what that could look like, and finds there could be both dramatic short-term effects and more subtle ones that will take […]